PKR parliamentarian N Surendran has come to the defence of his party colleague Wong Chen for wrongly naming a person in a parliamentary question relating to 1MDB.

Surendran believes there is no basis for Wong to be referred to the Rights and Privileges Committee.

The Padang Serai MP’s opinion comes after Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed suggested that Wong be brought to the committee for wrongly linking a top corporate leader to 1MDB.

However, Surendran argued that an MP could only be referred to the committee if he deliberately made a misleading statement to the Dewan Rakyat.

“In this case, Wong ( photo ) issued a statement immediately, admitting that it was an unintentional mistake on his part and apologised to the person wrongly named.

“An inadvertent error cannot give rise to any contempt or misconduct amounting to breach of privilege; this is also the position in other Commonwealth parliaments, including the UK House of Commons.

“It is absurd and unjust for Nur Jazlan to suggest that an MP be penalised for an unintended factual error,” Surendran said.

He added that it was also strange for Nur Jazlan to make this "genuine error" an issue of breach of parliamentary privilege.

“Surely this is a distraction from the more important question of what is being done by the Home Ministry to locate key individuals abroad who are in a position to assist in the 1MDB investigation.

“Furthermore, Wong merely named the incorrect person in a question to the minister, and not in any statement to the House," he added.

Surendran pointed out that what was more serious was how the home minister - who has large resources and staff at his disposal - perpetuated the error by failing to set the record straight in his reply to the MP's question.

Nur Jazlan said yesterday that Wong should not have wrongly linked Goldman Sachs Malaysia's corporate finance chairperson Yusof Yaacob to the troubled state investment fund.

Wong had, in a parliamentary question on Monday, named Yusof as the Deutsche Bank chairperson, a mistake he later admitted to. It is alleged that the bank has dealings with 1MDB.